Harmless-looking sexual violations impose hidden reproductive costs on others.

Evidence

In a famous study, Haidt et al. (1993) showed that a majority of participants in Brazil and the United States found objectionable the behavior of a man who buys a dead chicken in the supermarket and has sexual intercourse with it before cooking and eating it, even though they agreed that no one was harmed by this behavior. … However, as Weeden et al. (2008) note, sexual practices and sexual proximity actually do inflict a cost on individuals, men and women, involved in a committed relationship: — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 720

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s work on partner choice and Baumard’s mutualistic approach to morality — the dead-chicken judgment reframes as mate-price signaling, not harm-blindness. — connects to: Cheating males erode the reproductive payoff of weapons, capping their evolution — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 851; Camptown sexual exploitation results from deliberate human decisions, not natural male behavior.; People punish norm violations at personal cost even without direct harm — Ernst Fehr, Third-Party Punishment and Social Norms, 147
• DEFINE: Reveals the ‘strange but harmless’ moral puzzles as actually costly violations of relationship bargains rather than clear counterexamples to harm-based morality.

Broader Connections

• Cheating males erode the reproductive payoff of weapons, capping their evolution #expands (0.80) — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 851
• People punish norm violations at personal cost even without direct harm #corroborates (0.80) — Ernst Fehr, Third-Party Punishment and Social Norms, 147
• Camptown sexual exploitation results from deliberate human decisions, not natural male behavior. #complicates (0.75)